> The worst part of Firefox is the terribly long startup time. It can take up to 10 seconds after a reboot and takes quite a long time even with warm caches.

If you're the type with a lot of tabs open, that should improve a lot in the next few releases.

https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/index.ht...

> If you're the type with a lot of tabs open

I'm not and I don't store/restore tabs on close, so that's not the case here. It's just Firefox + Vimperator + uBlock origin with about:blank as home page.

I'm on Linux/X11 if that matters.

This is probably a good place to plug the fact that Vimperator is going to die with FF57 [1].

If anyone wants to help with making an alternative, look through that thread. I'm particularly invested in Tridactyl [2] but other people are working on others.

[1] https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/705

[2] https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl

Not strictly feature-equivalent, but there's already a working (I use it everyday) port of Vimium for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

I've been using VimFX all along, which is actively maintained and already compatible with multiprocess.

It's a web browser, not an actual text editor. 99% of the time, you're just wanting familiar keyboard commands for navigation. It feels like Vimperator does so many impractical things almost tongue-in-cheek, just to show how cool it is that they're theoretically possible.

VimFx is not compatible with multiprocess, it will stop working soon.

See https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860 :

    - You can use the current VimFx for the rest of 2017.
    - Then, Vimium is your best bet: philc/vimium#2425
    - VimFx is free software, so if somebody feels like converting it to a WebExtension they're totally free to do so! (But you're probably going to spend your time more wisely on Vimium.)
    - I hope to create a new add-on with the best parts from VimFx some day.
    - Firefox will become a better browser! It’s sad but worth the sacrifice.

Vimium-FF does works right now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

VimFx is perfectly compatible with multiprocess, as stated in the issue you linked:

https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860#issuecomme...

The issue is that VimFx is not feasible to convert into a WebExtension.

Ugh, that sucks, I just switched to VimFx because I thought it was ff57+ compatible. Now I'm not sure where I got that idea.

I haven't used vimium-ff, but it hasn't been updated in 3 months and the comments on mozilla are not encouraging.

Well, "soon" is tomorrow August 11: "PSA: Legacy extensions disabled by default on Nightly": https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2017-August/00...

I disagree, respectfully.

I like that there's always more stuff to learn about Vimperator. It's fun. There's a nice thread on GitHub where people are talking about their favourite features:

https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/729

That's odd, from SSD a cold firefox start takes a few seconds on my debian testing (using firefox 54 from apt). Maybe you're using a slow HDD?

Nope. It's a lightning fast m.2 SSD. And warm caches don't help either.

Are Vimperator + uBlock origin the only active add-ons? The Ubuntu Modifications one is known to cause slowdowns, for example.

What happens if you try to completely reset the Firefox profile, and bring back the plugins you want?

Happens without any extensions. I'm on Arch Linux, not Ubuntu.

I don't care enough to debug it further. Firefox is stable enough these days that restarting it isn't even a daily occurence. I have enough patience to wait that 10+ seconds, it's just a minor annoyance.

> If you're the type with a lot of tabs open

Then pray for Tree Style Tabs to be implemented by default in Firefox.

I hope not. I believe that it is better for Firefox to be as light and bloat-free by default while users are free to install whatever addon provides any extra features that they need.

Tree Style Tab could be an opt-in functionality of vanilla Firefox, that wouldn't be an issue for new users.

Although I firmly believed that tabs on the side make more sense for any kind of users. Nesting tabs require a bit more practice though and that could be an opt-in option.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't look like this - one of my favorite plugins - will survive v57.

See https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224

Thanks. I'd seen that thread months ago; it seems that the situation has improved a bit since then.

As I was searching around, I also came across this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/

...which looks to have similar functionality, and is already WE compatible.

Especially when we know we have browsed a site before but forgot the URL and remember only some portions of the title.

Firefox address bar is just more productive in simple things like re-opening frequent/historical sites.

In my experience, whenever Firefox takes more than a couple of seconds to start up, I know my Internet connection is acting up. It appears to be doing some sort of blocking network lookup on the startup path, and opens the intial window only after it succeeds or times out.

One thing that helps with Chrome's address bar is typing in a slash when searching for a site in your history. Suppose I visited this URL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lognormal_distribution

Chrome might or might not suggest it when I start typing "logn...". But if I type "/logn" it's there immediately. They're tokenizing URLs in a stupid way, apparently.

> But the one that really keeps me on Firefox is Vimperator. It's the best keyboard oriented browser UI in mainstream browsers. The extensions available for Chrome are nowhere near as good (last time I tried).

Did you ever use vimium on chrome? It's part of what keeps me on Chrome, I remember I had a quick glance at Vimperator a fair while ago, but switched back to chrome as it was what I was used to. I keep wondering about trying again.

Can you talk about the trade-offs between them?

This is supposedly a lot better with Firefox 55, released this week :)

Only for restoring lots of tabs.

And by god is it fast now. I have in excess of 200 tabs open in various groups (RIP Tab groups), and didn't remember that my Firefox had updated. I open Firefox, see it startup instantly and my first reaction was that Firefox somehow forgot all the tabs that I had loaded and had just started a new window. Imagine my surprise when everything was just as I wanted!

Yeah, I have a strong hunch that a ten-second startup time is due to restoring lots of tabs.